Choate Rosemary Hall Discloses Decades of Sexual Abuse
April 21, 2017 2:29 PM   Subscribe

Sexual Abuse at Choate Went On for Decades, School Acknowledges "Choate Rosemary Hall, the elite Connecticut boarding school, said on Thursday that at least 12 former teachers had sexually molested — and, in at least one case, raped — students in a pattern of abuse dating to the 1960s."

“They are closed systems, especially residential private schools where kids are separated from their parents,” said Paul Mones, a lawyer who represents victims of sexual abuse. “It’s not like a public school, with people coming in and out all the time. There are many more opportunities for teachers to do this.”

Choate said it had been compelled to examine this ugly history in 2013, after two alumni alerted the school to sexual misconduct they had experienced as students, the report said. In 2016, The Boston Globe published an article that described abuse at the school, and shortly thereafter, Choate announced that it had appointed an investigator from the law firm Covington & Burling.
posted by A. Davey (31 comments total) 6 users marked this as a favorite
 
I am beginning to think that administrators should be charged with conspiracy to abet sexual abuse in cases like this. Put them on the sexual offenders registry.

I'm actually not in favor of sexual offender registries, but these assholes deserve their place, since we have them.
posted by GenjiandProust at 3:00 PM on April 21, 2017 [23 favorites]


What To Do If Children Are Being Sexually Abused Or Raped At Your School: An Administrator's Guide

1. Call police and support experts for the victims
2. See #1

This is never an internal matter.
posted by warriorqueen at 4:05 PM on April 21, 2017 [47 favorites]


I am truly shocked that the school is admitting what everybody has known for decades. I honestly never considered this as a possibility.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 5:01 PM on April 21, 2017 [1 favorite]


(Still irrationally jealous of kids who got to go to boarding school, because there was still unchecked sexual abuse at our public school in addition to our terrible home lives. I guess the grass is always greener.)
posted by The Underpants Monster at 5:07 PM on April 21, 2017 [7 favorites]


I grew up a pretty serious Catholic, went to Catholic schools, Went to the jr. seminary and later the college seminary. This was a specific system (Los Angeles Archdiocese) notorious for churning out pious pedophiles and predators for decades. I was taught by, and even admired, some very highly esteemed men who later were disgraced and even jailed for their terrible behavior. Even then, I knew it was a really weird environment. but I never knew just how weird. When sex/pedophile scandals began to gain momentum, it just boggled my mind. When discovering illegal activity, why the fuck would you not just immediately call the police and let the legal system do what it's supposed to do? What kind of virtue or honor is to be had by keeping these things under wraps? I'd thought the Catholic system resembled a big bizarro boy's club. It seemed more and more bizarre, and alien, as the years went by. Boy, did I really dodge a bullet getting out when I did.

Striking that I came to realize that there was no secret special sauce that made the Catholic system so awful. It turns out this awfulness is baked into our genes, and expresses whenever there are dynamics that revere institutions and authority. Even when an institution is founded on things like love, charity, learning, there is always justification to preserve institutions and authority. The more it values institutions and authority, the more critical it is to do anything to preserve them. Those founding principles must take a back seat to preserve the institutions and authority. Of course, if you've done it once, doing it a second time (and third, and so on) becomes easier and easier. It becomes a poison that lingers unless you can face the ugliness in the face, admit it, and take the lumps for it. I know people, old classmates and buddies, who still defend the bizarro old boy's club where I was schooled, still fly the flag of a failure. Those of us who admit the whole thing was built on a shaky foundation are regarded as weak, giving in to whatever the enemies are lobbing, even traitorous.
posted by 2N2222 at 5:19 PM on April 21, 2017 [33 favorites]


I went to boarding school. I'm grateful that I did, but I've also spent many an hour in therapy unpacking it. One gift that the school can give students (at least the ones who aren't lazy-ass legacies) is an early sense of adult responsibility. That same sense of responsibility can give a terrible freight to your every move. You feel as if challenging what's going on at the school, being disciplined or God forbid expelled, would be throwing away your whole future, everything you worked for, everything your parents worked for, everything you thought you could be. If there's no appropriate culture and policy, this attitude can create perfectly compliant victims for predators.

This kind of thing happens at a hell of a lot of schools, good and bad. The difference is, of course, that boarding school students are more likely to grow up into people with the cultural and economic capital to pursue justice, and if it's a prestigious school, the headline can make a national splash.
posted by Countess Elena at 5:23 PM on April 21, 2017 [9 favorites]


I was glad to see that Spanier, Schulz and Curley were all found guilty of child endangerment in the Sandusky case.

There is a new PA law now mandating background checks for anyone in a university context who has contact with a minor. It's invasive, and controversial at my institution. And it still would not have snared Sandusky.
posted by Dashy at 5:30 PM on April 21, 2017 [2 favorites]


This kind of thing happens at a hell of a lot of schools, good and bad. The difference is, of course, that boarding school students are more likely to grow up into people with the cultural and economic capital to pursue justice, and if it's a prestigious school, the headline can make a national splash.
I'm actually sort of curious about whether that's what is going on here. It now seems that there was systemic sexual abuse at a lot of elite boarding schools, but it might just be that there was systemic sexual abuse at a lot of schools, period, and we're more likely to hear about the boarding schools because their alumni have the resources to pursue justice and the national papers are more interested in the stories.
There is a new PA law now mandating background checks for anyone in a university context who has contact with a minor.
Huh, that's interesting. My university has an early college program, which brings kids as young as 15 to live and study on campus, and a fair number of local high-school students take some college classes. Potentially, any of us can have contact with minors. I certainly do, and I'm not in any special minor-contact-having position. Are they going to make any prof or TA with a high-school student in their class go through a background check?
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 5:36 PM on April 21, 2017 [4 favorites]


Yes. The law is less strict for people with only incidental contact, and the big-l law has historically treated 17-yo freshmen as adults, but for anyone involved in a pre-college program, absolutely.
posted by Dashy at 5:43 PM on April 21, 2017


When discovering illegal activity, why the fuck would you not just immediately call the police and let the legal system do what it's supposed to do?

I think the Choate cases being reported here included incidents that were not illegal; the age of consent in Connecticut is 16 (and I think was 15 when the oldest cases included in the investigation reported here occurred).

It's now illegal in Connecticut for teachers to have sex with students, including students who are 16 and older, but I don't think that was the case until 1994.

It now seems that there was systemic sexual abuse at a lot of elite boarding schools

I don't know if the report establishes systemic sexual abuse at Choate. That certainly is the impression you would get from the headline "Sexual Abuse Went on for Decades," but I think "at least 12 teachers in more than 50 years" is less convincing as evidence of a systemic practice.
posted by layceepee at 5:43 PM on April 21, 2017 [1 favorite]


Actually, there were two points in the Choate report of merit. First, that while the report also noted that it could be 'only' 12 reported cases in 50 years, they also noted that they did not even attempt to find out whether that rate was average. I read that as 'even one is too many', and found it a worthwhile lack of defense on their part.

Second, in the individual reports, there was plenty of room for, and a very notable absence of, reports or insinuation of participation or consent of the minors in question. But there were none - no defense of the teachers' behavior by 'she was flirting' or 'we were in love!' or such. That is: they were minors, and cannot consent, and the report seemed to treat it that way, at least to me.
posted by Dashy at 5:52 PM on April 21, 2017 [2 favorites]


I'm actually sort of curious about whether that's what is going on here.

It's probably not as simple; I don't mean to be ungenerous. Times have changed, and good educators are far more likely to be people who also take sexual misconduct very seriously. There's been some soul-searching in the elite school community regarding this issue, as far as I can tell. My old school conducted an investigation, reaching out to all alums, asking for them to report anything that they could, and I appreciated that. There was no systemic pattern of sexual abuse or coverup in that report, and from my own experience, I did not expect that there would be. (There had been, however, two longtime staff members who were found to be pedophiles interested in much younger children. But the school never tried sweeping them under the rug. They went to jail.)
posted by Countess Elena at 6:03 PM on April 21, 2017


The athletic trainer at my perfectly mediocre public high school in the 1990s was creepy. He kept trying to get me to come to the training room to use the whirlpool for an injury, but I kept saying no because he was creepy. When he sexually assaulted a student who was required to visit him for an injury, he was immediately fired and arrested. In general, public schools even back then had multiple safety rules in place, comprehensive background checks, etc., that prevented this culture of child abuse (yes, it's child abuse) from being perpetuated, and they responded immediately by calling the police when these things happened in spite of those efforts.

I may be socially inferior to boarding school grads and lack their fancy connections, but I have a PhD from a fancy school and my life is pretty great now, and I did that without having to attend an expensive school that was the site of a decades' long conspiracy to hide sexual assault.
posted by hydropsyche at 6:11 PM on April 21, 2017 [6 favorites]


In general, public schools even back then had multiple safety rules in place, comprehensive background checks, etc., that prevented this culture of child abuse (yes, it's child abuse) from being perpetuated, and they responded immediately by calling the police when these things happened in spite of those efforts

Well, shit. Must have just been the good-old-boy jerkwater rural districts I lucked into. Of course, the police in those towns were about as useful as a rubber crutch, so it wouldn't have done much good to call them anyway.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 7:14 PM on April 21, 2017


In general, public schools even back then had multiple safety rules in place, comprehensive background checks, etc., that prevented this culture of child abuse (yes, it's child abuse) from being perpetuated, and they responded immediately by calling the police when these things happened in spite of those efforts.

This is...just not true. Even in your case: I'm very glad you weren't assaulted, and that he was arrested after assaulting one of your fellow-students, but are you actually so very confident that that victim was his very first?

Boarding school provides far more comprehensive opportunities to the predator (although I think some of the isolation from parents that facilitates abuse must be diminished in the modern era of communication), but the dynamics of abuse can exist in any school.
posted by praemunire at 7:37 PM on April 21, 2017 [9 favorites]


I went to boarding school (not Choate). This report, sadly, does not surprise me at all.
posted by thivaia at 8:02 PM on April 21, 2017 [2 favorites]


are you actually so very confident that that victim was his very first?

I have no idea how many other people he raped. But I am pretty confident that she was the first victim at the school because the women athletes were a pretty tight knit bunch and when this happened we heard about it immediately.

And again, they fired him and called the police, and he ultimately was found guilty and went to prison. That is very different from the stories from Choate or from the Spotlight articles about sexual assault at other boarding schools (or about Catholic priests). The assault was not ignored. He was not quietly let go so that he could go to another school and do the same thing (over and over again).

They called the fucking police. Because that is what you do when an adult sexually assaults a child under your care.
posted by hydropsyche at 3:46 AM on April 22, 2017 [2 favorites]




There is a new PA law now mandating background checks for anyone in a university context who has contact with a minor.

I'm going to explain why these background checks suck because they use the same ones for the Welfare Workfirst program in Jersey for the state child care offered to parents in the program.

The background check only investigates the person directly involved with children, not in the people that indirectly works around those people like secretaries, facility staff, assistants, etc.. Also these background checks specifically look for previous child endangerment or abuse and for jail time served. It doesn't look for assault charges, substance abuse charges, weapons charges, general violence, fraud, etc. It also is done once and any charges that come after are never looked at.

Like the state will tell a single mom, here is a list of three people. They took an hour class on childcare. We did a background check of just them and no one else in the house/group and inspected their place three months ago.

How many abusers do you think are going to get a hold of kids? Because if you guess a lot? You're right. And that's the system most schools and government departments use for people involved in working with kids.
posted by 80 Cats in a Dog Suit at 6:25 AM on April 22, 2017


"at least 12 teachers in more than 50 years" is less convincing as evidence of a systemic practice.

Oh I agree: you have to bake in the expectation that there will be at least a couple of sexual predators working in your school at any given time and that doesn't make it a systematic problem IN FUCKING BIZARRO WORLD
posted by Lentrohamsanin at 6:27 AM on April 22, 2017 [4 favorites]


This from today's Letters to the Editor in the New York Times:

"I was a student at Choate in the 1950s while it was an all-boys’ school. One of the teachers mentioned by name in your article was my sixth-form housemaster. Sadly, he is deceased, and this blot upon his memory will outlast his distinguished teaching career at Choate. Naming and staining his reputation does no honor to the school or to that teacher’s legacy of academic and professional expertise. 'The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones. So let it be with …' "

In case anyone is wondering what sort of calculus is behind the shielding of sexual predators, here it is:

Distinguished Teaching Career + Legacy of Academic and Professional Expertise = Impunity, anonymity and a lifetime supply of How Dare-You-Impugn-His-Reputation cards!
posted by A. Davey at 7:49 AM on April 22, 2017 [16 favorites]


For what it's worth, when I was a student member of Choate's dysfunctional society in the early 1970s, the student slang for having an in with a professor was "I have suck with Mr. XYZ."
posted by A. Davey at 8:22 AM on April 22, 2017 [3 favorites]


And again, they fired him and called the police, and he ultimately was found guilty and went to prison. That is very different from the stories from Choate or from the Spotlight articles about sexual assault at other boarding schools (or about Catholic priests). The assault was not ignored. He was not quietly let go so that he could go to another school and do the same thing (over and over again).

In your case (though, even then, I'm going to point out that if he preyed on anyone other than your friends who didn't come forward, or who tried to and was quieted, you wouldn't know about it, by definition). As someone who went to both boarding school and public school over part of the era covered here, I find your belief that public schools generally had a rigorous program for the prevention, detection, and punishment of sexual offenses by authority figures just...not accurate.

This is not a defense of boarding schools. This is a criticism of both systems.
posted by praemunire at 10:19 AM on April 22, 2017 [2 favorites]


When I was in (non-private) high school in the 80s, one of the gym teachers very suddenly disappeared midday. So did three of the cheerleaders. The school was buzzing, and when the cheerleaders showed up the next day all they said was they couldn't talk about it.

But they did to other cheerleaders, and while I wasn't popular I also was nosy, overheard things , and was known to be the third least-handsy guy in my class (the 1 and 2 being as openly gay as you could be in 1980s northern NJ), so I found out the situation as a "safe guy", which was that as cheerleading coach he also demanded sexual favors from some of the cheerleaders to stay on the squad. One of them finally refused when he wanted more than oral, and she and two others went to the cops, bypassing the entire school structure. Suprisingly the cops (one of whom had two sons playing football, and another football player was the chief's son, so you're going to expect this be all shoved under the rug) took it very seriously and got him out of school. He was tried and convicted and the school just quietly removed his photo from the yearbook.

There was an actual student rape case and they buried that too.

Sometimes things need to get exhumed, and let the evil men do be exhumed and examined so this malodorous tradition can be stopped.
posted by mephron at 10:25 AM on April 22, 2017 [3 favorites]


I'm going to have to agree with 2N2222 up thread - "...I came to realize that there was no secret special sauce that made the Catholic system so awful. It turns out this awfulness is baked into our genes, and expresses whenever there are dynamics that revere institutions and authority."
Obviously I can't say we came to the same conclusion, but after realizing that all instances of power will be abused, period, it only stood to reason with me that we need to erase all instances of power. Unfortunately the people in power do not seem to agree.

I was in marching band in high school. Other than the band teacher, there were several other consultants who came to work with us, most of them were teachers at other schools that didn't have marching bands. In my junior year the guy who trained our brass section was arrested for having sexual relations with a 16 year-old from another school. His wife was the one who trained our woodwinds section. She kept coming to practices after he didn't. As a csa survivor, the whole thing was really painful and I ended up not being in the marching band my senior year, having kids joke about his "hot young girlfriend" was too much.
posted by FirstMateKate at 10:50 AM on April 22, 2017 [1 favorite]


Good Christ, that article about Larry Lessig. I don't know if I'll ever hear another institutional boys' choir without thinking of this. The Boychoir School was apparently an old boys' club for pedophile teachers. According to that story, the wealthiest offender fled the country and died "at 87, in Mexico, where he was overseeing an orphanage."
posted by Countess Elena at 11:33 AM on April 22, 2017 [1 favorite]


I think "at least 12 teachers in more than 50 years" is less convincing as evidence of a systemic practice.

12 teachers and maybe twice that many students, is... maybe not systemic. (Depends on your definition of systemic, and whether other teachers knew or strongly suspected it was going on and decided not to try to find out more.) 12 teachers and a couple-hundred students, is systemic. (Hypothetical number. We don't have actual victim numbers.) To sort out how "systemic" it was, we'd need to know: how many victims did each of these teachers have, and how much did the rest of the staff know and decide wasn't worth "making a fuss" over?

Also, the article indicates there could be a lot more than 12 teachers involved. Those are all former teachers, ones who left or were fired (or "let go"), some over these incidents; those are the ones the school feels it has solid enough evidence to go public with. Those are the ones they're convinced will not be suing them for defamation.

Teachers that were quietly pushed to resign because of a couple of allegations of groping or too-flirty behavior with well-connected students, whose parents threatened to get loud or withdraw funding, won't be on that list.
“Even when a teacher was terminated or resigned in the middle of the school year because he or she had engaged in sexual misconduct with a student, the rest of the faculty was told little and sometimes nothing about the teacher’s departure and, when told, was cautioned to say nothing about the situation if asked.”
That sounds plenty systemic, even if it was only once every 3 years or so for 50 years.
posted by ErisLordFreedom at 12:31 PM on April 22, 2017


Naming and staining his reputation does no honor to the school or to that teacher’s legacy of academic and professional expertise

It sure doesn't! Wait, why should anyone wish to do honor to the school or to that teacher's legacy?

also some people would take that quote he quotes to mean that one shouldn't do evil because everyone will remember it, not that one shouldn't remember evil because it isn't nice. considering the speaker, the subject, and the context. but then, I didn't go to fancy boarding school so my interpretive powers are limited.

Choate sent me a brochure once and I asked my mom if she would send me there, since I had already tried and failed to get her to homeschool me and didn't have the balls to run away. she looked at the brochure and the tuition rates and said, why not? If you'd rather go here than go to college, sure! because I can afford exactly one of them. so I didn't go. very much for the best, I guess.
posted by queenofbithynia at 12:35 PM on April 22, 2017 [1 favorite]


I went to Choate for three semesters, during which I took classes with two of the faculty members named in the document.

It is very strange to realize at exactly the same time as the rest of the world that my life briefly ran alongside monstrousness. It's very strange to hear society ponder, to hear the flurries of opinions, to hear the outrage and the tut-tutting and the hair-splitting and the sympathy and the lawyering. Because a little voice in me seems to say, what does it all mean? What do all these words mean? Even the outrage feels alien and wanly laughable, though I know it's appropriate.

As to whether it was systemic, here are two very simple questions: did any adults at the institution discover that children were being raped? And did the institution then fail to initiate prosecution of the perpetrators to the fullest extent of the law?
posted by Vic Morrow's Personal Vietnam at 9:53 PM on April 22, 2017 [6 favorites]


I don't think legislation will fix this, but every student who was harmed should sue the school and get a serious cash award. Money is an excellent learning tool for crap like this.
posted by theora55 at 10:14 AM on April 23, 2017


Ousted Over Sexual Misconduct Claims, and On to the Next Teaching Job

These seems to be a common problem in situations like these. Congress created a National Practitioner Data Bank to collect negative information on medical professionals (malpractice, license suspensions, etc) and distribute it to the sources who need it (hospitals, group practices, insurers). The US should build an identical database for educational professionals and requires schools to A, report stuff like this to it, and B, use it during hiring.
posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 4:25 PM on April 23, 2017 [2 favorites]


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